Bible Uncommentary: Genesis 1 -- In the Beginning ...

Title/Preface/TOC 

Bible Uncommentary: Genesis 1 

In the beginning ...

What beginning?

The beginning of the entire universe, including all the stars in the night sky? I suppose, just from this much, we might  think so.

But, let's think for a moment. This is the first chapter of

The First Book of Moses
Called
Genesis

that we are looking at. (That's the title, as given in the Bible.) 

Reading along with me will help keep track of what I'm talking about. It'll will also give you a chance to figure out where you might agree with me and where you might not, and why.

For the longest time, I thought "genesis" meant "life". You know, genes, genealogy, ...

Okay, maybe I can't really give a good explanation where that interpretation came from (explain the genesis of my interpretation, hey?). But I had that impression.

All dictionary entries for genesis that I've seen talk about origins. Many talk about "coming into being".

What is the purpose of the book of Genesis?

Near as I can tell from reading the Bible a few times, Moses is trying to explain to the people of the Camp of Israel where they came from. And at least part of the purpose behind that is to try to convince them that the gods of the people in the lands around them were not worth worshiping, any more than the gods of the land they had just left.

Because, you know, it's easier to admire what you can see than what you can't, and people do like to admire things. I don't think we consider the world they were living in carefully enough. It was a harsh world, not nearly as much eye candy as we have in our world. And it's always really tempting to let admiration go beyond admiration as works of art.

So, where they came from.

Not so much where the universe came from, although that also is mentioned, somewhat ambiguously, but where they came from. 

The beginning relative to them, and us. 

I have to acknowledge, my opinions here are influenced by my having gone several times through the first several chapters of Genesis in parallel with the almost, but not quite identical texts in the Book of Moses and the Book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price. 

The Pearl of Great Price is one of the standard works of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I also acknowledge that there are people who raise controversies about it. It is enlightening to me, and that is enough for me.

So when the text in Genesis says

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

I don't feel any particular need to read that as that it was created all at the same time. 

Also, I don't see any reason not to see it as Moses retelling what was shown him, the creation as relevant to him in the world where he was living. 

This is about God (and us), not about the universe. It seems to me that Moses is saying

Israel, you have God who created the heavens and the earth and everything in them. Why do you need these gods that created nothing, that were instead created by mortal humans no better than yourselves?

As I understand it, Moses himself had seen the creation in vision, and he knew how impressive it was. He was trying to give the people of the Camp something of the vision he had. But the language he had available was just missing vocabulary and phrasing for a lot of important concepts. 

It helps to be concrete rather than abstract, so he walked the people through it as best he could, with words and language he thought they could understand.

In the Bible, we don't see it very clearly, but in the Pearl of Great Price, we see some discussion of the measurement of time in the world where God resides. I guess Peter does mention this to a certain extent when he says, in 2nd Peter 3 v. 8,

... one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.

I don't think "as a thousand years" must be read as literally "equal to". What we can say is that a day for God, at any rate, is a long time in our reckoning of time.

Moreover, in the first day, the earth itself was without form, and the sun had not yet caught fire. Hard to see the kind of day and night we're familiar with in that kind of environment. It's kind of hard for me to say that first day must be a literal 24 hours or a thousand years, or even any specific time period. And if the first day was not exactly twenty-four hours or exactly one thousand years, what of the next five days?

Words for day are also used in most languages to mean some period of time, rather than some definite interval. For example, in English, we often say, "in my day" to refer to a time in the past relevant to ourselves.

With God, all things are possible. The earth and the solar system might have been made in a couple of 24 hour days, and the plants, animals, and man in a few more. Or it might have been several thousand years, six days plus a day of rest according to the planet on which God resides. 

Or the earth may have been initially tidally locked to the sun, like the moon is to the earth, developing an actual rotation period as it developed form, so that the first day was much longer than the second, and much longer than a thousand years.

Or the six phases of the creation might have taken four billion years, plus or minus, as scientists say nowadays, and Moses, not having the language to deal with such long intervals of time, might have just been using night and day as a metaphor for the passage of time, to delineate the phases of creation.

In the first day or phase, the Spirit of God moved upon the waters. 

Waters? 

The name of the element hydrogen comes from water in most of our languages. Hydrogen is the most prominent element in universe.  

Spirit?

God is the creator of the universe. The laws of physics are God's work. On the one hand, the Spirit of God is metaphor for physical principles like gravity and light. On the other hand, the physical principles are literal expressions of God's personality. 

This is something that I have found in scripture. Physical fact often becomes metaphor for physical fact when principles in one context act similarly toprinciples in another, especially when directly connected to them. The Spirit of God communicates with us through our conscience. The Spirit of God communicates with the planets and other celestial bodies through gravity, or, in other words, gravity is one expression of the Spirit of God. 

From a different point of view, the initial or pre-existing parameters that physicists speak of in the theory of the big bang creation are the mind of God, and the forces which derive therefrom are the way the Spirit of God works in the natural world.

So gravity and other physical principles work on the clouds of hydrogen mixed with other stuff (including frozen water and methane) and a huge bunch of it coalesces into one locus until gravity heats it enough and

Let there be light.

And finally we have day. Even though the earth is still not very well formed, probably not rotating very fast, there is also night, and one phase is delineated. 

Rocks clump together and gravity clumps more of them together, and gases and frozen water are pulled in towards the big clump of rocks and dirt and separates the hydrogen above the firmament of the atmosphere of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen from the ice mixed in with the rocks and dirt.

Firmament? 

What was the word for atmosphere back then? Did they have one?

The rocks at the center of the huge clump are heating up, and the ice melts, and water covers the rocks. And in the second day or phase, the waters (hydrogen) under the primitive atmosphere are separated from the waters (hydrogen) above by the primitive atmosphere, by the firmament or sky. 

And the primitive atmosphere is very dense, hardly letting light through at all.

Huge clump of dirt. Huge clump of earth. Bigger than the biggest mountain you've seen. Bigger than thousands of mountains. Bigger than Moses could describe in the language he had available to explain it to the members of the camp. 

So huge you can't explore the surface of it all in a single day, or a year, or, really, in a lifetime. Big enough to be so heavy that it holds you to the surface and makes the surface feel (relatively) flat.

And our pre-mortal spirits were all there watching, as I understand it, helping in various ways.

What could we do as spirits (since we hadn't yet been given bodies)? I don't know. We witnessed it. As Job notes (jumping way ahead in the Bible), we rejoiced because we were going to get a world to experience life in. (At least, when I read God asking Job where he was, I read it as God reminding Job that he was there, rejoicing, too.)

(And there are verses in the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, and the Doctrine and Covenants that seem to be best interpreted as that we were there, also.)

And time passed and day turned into night and then into day again. And the atmosphere changed in composition, and the land on the surface started emerging from under the seas, and the land (and the ocean) were being biochemically prepared for plant life. As I read it, there was primitive plant life (grass bearing seed, etc.) developing on the land, and therefore, I must assume, in the continental shelf area under the water, by the time the earth rotated again through night and back into day.

Now the content of the atmosphere changed more, becoming closer to the oxygen/nitrogen combination we know, and the stars became visible in the night sky, and the sun was visible in the day sky. The other planets in our solar system would be in the process of formation, and they would become visible, too. And I'm not sure whether we should understand that the moon was captured during the fourth phase, or whether it just became visible. I tend to think it was captured during the fourth phase, further driving the process we would call, in our modern language, terraforming. But maybe it just became visible.

In the fifth phase, the seas were prepared for animal life, and primitive animal life began.

In the sixth phase, the earth was further prepared for animal life, and God and all of us were still helping get things prepared. 

Because, truly, even 4,000,000,000 years is not enough for life to come out of random reactions unless there is something influencing the randomness, something preventing at least a few of the random reactions from being followed by sequences of reactions that would completely destroy the "successes" to that point.

Besides, without an observer to give meaning to the reactions, there is no definition of success. Maybe watching actually was helping.

Why do I say it was being prepared? There are some verses in chapter 2 that talk about everything being created before it was all created. If we understand the first six phases of creation as preparatory, those verses make more sense.

Some people go as far as to think that the first six days were planning sessions, and the days and nights mentioned were on the planet where God and we were parked during the process. If so, I think that planet must have been some distance away, as we measure distance -- maybe about 8,300 parsecs away in what is normal space and time to us, perhaps brought effectively closer by means of something like what we call a wormhole. This is well beyond what I have confidence in asserting, however. I only mention it as another example of a possible reading of the days and nights of the creation.

And really, this is all quite a bit beyond anything the people of the Camp of Israel could have understood when Moses was trying to explain it. The point that they are supposed to understand is that God was actively involved in the natural processes (and we, with Him). 

God could not help but be involved, because God is the source of nature itself. And the naturalness of the processes is not a good reason to abandon the concept that the God of nature was behind it all, and try to worship the works of our own hands.

Nature is the expression of God in our universe.

No other God is worthy of our worship but the source of all truth. 

And if it is not true, we have to understand that it is not of God, that it is not God.

In the days of Moses, there were many idols of human invention which people tried to treat as if they were God. In many cases, mortal humans tried to pattern their idols after their understanding and misunderstandings of the real God, but in the end the invented gods are not God. 

In the time since then, humans have repeatedly tried to co-opt the real God and dress Him up and remake Him in the image of their limited ideals and philosophies. Same old thing.

Either way there are a lot of false ideas about God in circulation. One of our homework problems while we are here in this life is weeding through the false ideas and setting them aside, and seeking the true understanding of God. 

That's part of the reason that God has helped us preserve some of the records left behind by people like Moses who gained a fairly clear understanding of this sort of thing in the past.

In the latter verses of this chapter, God is creating the human race, male and female, and telling them -- us -- that we are to assume responsibility for the earth and the plants and animals on it. (The specific creation of Adam and Eve, the individuals, is described in chapter 2.)

Responsibility.

We have changed the meaning of dominion so that we can try to ignore responsibility and convince ourselves that dominion can be arbitrary -- can allow us to do what we please. 

But dominion, in the sense that God gave us dominion, comes with the responsibility to take care of things, along with the requirement that we report to God on our efforts at the end of the day, and at the end of our assignments in mortality, and receive and accept His judgement of what we did with what were were given. (This is also all made clear elsewhere, as are the justice and mercy of God that we can look forward to in the evaluation.) 

Dominion is responsibility, not privilege. (Not just privilege? In our present world, it may be better to deny privilege entirely. In a few years, because of changes in the general public dialog, we may need to recognize the privilege aspect again, as part of it, along with the responsibility. So much of communicating correctly depends on context.)

God is creating us, but, again, there are verses in chapter 2 that indicate that chapter 1 is describing some kind of preparatory creation -- including planning, perhaps including giving us our assignments of what we should do in mortality.

As potential support for the interpretation as six phases in planning, I offer that the last verse of the chapter talks about God seeing that everything was very good. Given that God is not subject to time the way we are as mortals, Moses could be telling us that He was seeing the future relative to us, that His plans would work out very well.

Oh, yeah. He.

He created us in His image. Male and female.

Male and female are also concepts that have been altered in our language; misinterpretations of what it means to be male or female have been woven into our language for millennia, and we have to weed through those, as well.

The name of God is sometimes given as (Latinized to) Jehovah -- or Yahweh. It is also sometimes given as Elohim. Elohim is a plural form. So is Adonai, another name for God found in the Bible. These plural forms are usually explained away as royal plural. This explanation is one of those traditions that we might ought to set aside. No. We really need to set it aside.

Until very recently, the neutral gender pronoun in English was formed by putting the masculine pronoun to double use. We have traditionally semantically overloaded the male forms.

The worship of Asherah and other female gods was often associated with a number of idolatrous practices that are best not to follow, and even now it is well to be careful when talking about a female God. 

But it would make sense that, if the text says "male and female after the image" of God, it is because there are principles of maleness and femaleness in the principle of Godliness.

Might we need to believe that God the Father is a true hermaphrodite? That was a possibility I considered when I was younger. 

I think I prefer to understand that God takes the singular form because neither Father nor Mother are subject to the egoism that would have them competing with each other for superiority and precedence. They would be in such perfect unity that, if one did something, it would be no different than if the other had done it. And it would be such perfect unity that the true worship of the one is identical to the true worship of the other. Thus, one united God.

-- which is quite clearly not the case in the ancient myths about Asherah and Baal, and their Greek and Roman counterparts, or other similar religions which claim both male and female gods but continually put them in competition with each other.

Again, there are other possible interpretations, and, before I forget, I should again point out that these are my interpretations. I don't have time to touch on all my beliefs in relation to Genesis 1, either, and I shouldn't. My understanding won't save you.

Scripture study is about developing your own understanding. It is when we understand the scriptures in our own context that they develop the power to help us, to take us to the next context in our several journeys.

The above is not binding on anyone, and I reserve the right to re-think my understanding. The above ideas should be understood to be personal opinions presented to provoke you to thought and study, and not considered doctrinal.

 Genesis 2 -- ... And Not a Man to Till the Ground

---

 An earlier version of this can be found at https://guerillamormonism.blogspot.com/2022/11/thoughts-on-bible-genesis-1.html.

Thoughts on the Bible: Genesis 1

[This also just is not working. 

(See https://guerillamormonism.blogspot.com/2022/11/in-beginning-gen-01-not-good-start-on.html for a previous attempt that didn't work very well.)

(Better yet, see https://guerillamormonism.blogspot.com/2022/11/bible-uncommentary-titleprefacetoc.html for what I hope is going to work.)]

In the beginning ...

What beginning?

The beginning of the entire universe, including all the stars in the night sky? I suppose, just from this much, we might  think so.

But, let's think for a moment. This is

The First Book of Moses
Called
Genesis

For the longest time, I thought "genesis" meant "life". You know, genes, genealogy, ...

Okay, maybe I can't really give a good explanation where that interpretation came from (the genesis of my interpretation, hey?). But I had that impression.

All dictionary entries for genesis that I've seen talk about origins. Many talk about "coming into being".

What is the purpose of the book of Genesis?

Near as I can tell from reading it a few times, Moses is trying to explain to the people of the Camp of Israel where they came from. And the purpose behind that is to try to convince them that the gods that of the people in the lands around them were not worth worshiping.

Because, you know, it's easier to admire what you can see than what you can't.

So, where they came from. 

Not so much where the universe came from, although that also is mentioned, somewhat ambiguously.

I have to acknowledge, my opinions here are somewhat influenced by my having gone several times through the first several chapters of Genesis in parallel with the nearly identical texts in the Book of Moses and the Book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price. 

The Pearl of Great Price is one of the standard works of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I also acknowledge that there are people who raise controversies about it. It is enlightening to me, and that is enough for me.

So when the text in Genesis says

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

I don't feel any particular need to read that as all at once. 

This is about God, not about the universe. Moses is saying

Israel, you have God who created the heavens and the earth and everything in them. Why do you need these gods that created nothing, that were rather created by mortal humans no better than yourselves?

But Moses himself had seen the creation in vision, and he knew how impressive it was, and how it helps to be concrete rather than abstract, so he walked the people through it.  

In the Bible, we don't see it very clearly, but in the Pearl of Great Price, we see some discussion of the measurement of time in the world where God resides. Peter mentions this when he says, in 2nd Peter 3 v. 8, that a day for God is like a thousand years for us. Not equal, like. A day for God, at any rate, is a long time in our reckoning of time.

Moreover, in the first day, the earth itself was without form, and the sun had not yet caught fire. It's kind of hard to say that first day was a literal 24 hours, or even any specific time period. 

The Spirit of God moved upon the waters. 

Waters? 

The name of the element hydrogen comes from water. Hydrogen is the most prominent element in universe. 

God is the creator of the universe. The laws of physics are God's work. On the one hand, the Spirit of God is metaphor for physical principles like gravity and light. On the other hand, the physical principles are literal expressions of God's personality.

Gravity and other physical principles work on the clouds of hydrogen mixed with other stuff (including frozen water and methane) and a huge bunch of it coalesces into one locus until gravity heats it enough and

Let there be light.

And finally we have day. Even though the earth is still not very well formed, probably not rotating very fast, there is also night. 

Rocks clump together and gravity clumps more of them together, and gases and frozen water are pulled in towards the big clump of rocks and dirt and separates the hydrogen above the firmament of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrogen from the ice mixed in with the rocks and dirt.

But the rocks at the center of the clump are heating up, and the ice melts, and water covers the rocks. And in the second day, the waters under the primitive atmosphere are separated from the hydrogen above by the primitive atmosphere, the "sky".

And our pre-mortal spirits were all there watching, and, as I understand it, helping in various ways. What could we do as spirits (since we hadn't yet been given bodies)? I don't know. We witnessed it. We rejoiced because we were going to get a world to experience life in.

And a long time passed and day turned into night and then into day again. And the atmosphere changed in composition, and the land on the surface started appearing from under the seas, and the land (and the ocean) were being biochemically prepared for plant life. As I read it, there was primitive plant life (grass bearing seed, etc.) on the land, and therefore, we must assume, in continental shelf area under the water by the time the earth rotated again through night and back into day.

Now the content of the atmosphere changed more, becoming closer to the oxygen/nitrogen combination we know, and the stars appeared in the night sky, and the sun was visible in the day sky. And I'm not sure whether we should understand that the moon was captured during the fourth period, or whether it just became visible. I tend to think it was captured during the fourth period, further driving the process we would call in our modern language, terraforming.

In the fifth period, the seas were prepared for animal life, and primitive animal life began.

In the sixth period, the earth was further prepared for animal life, and God and all of us were still helping get things prepared. Because, truly, even 4,000,000,000 years is not enough for life to come out of random reactions unless there is something influencing the randomness, something preventing at least a few of the random reactions from being followed by reactions that would completely destroy the "successes" to that point.

Besides, without an observer to give meaning to the reactions, there is no definition of success.

Why do I way prepared? There are some verses in chapter 2 that talk about everything being created before it was all created.

Some people think that the first six days were planning sessions, and the days and nights were on the planet where God and we were parked during the process. If so, I think it must have been some distance away, as we measure distance -- about 8,300 parsecs away, perhaps brought effectively closer by means of a wormhole. This is well beyond what I have confidence in asserting, however.

And really, this is all quite a bit beyond anything the people of the Camp of Israel could have understood when Moses was trying to explain it. The point is that God was actively involved in the natural processes (and we, with Him). 

God could not help but be involved, because God is the source of nature itself. 

Nature is the expression of God in our universe.

No other God is worthy of our worship but the source of all truth. If it is not true, we have to understand that it is not God.

In the days of Moses, the idols were of human invention, and humans tried to pattern their idols after what they understood of the real God. 

In the time since then, humans have tried to co-opt the real God and dress Him up and remake Him in the image of their limited ideals and philosophies. 

Either way there are a lot of false ideas about God in circulation. One of our homework problems while we are here in this life is weeding through the false ideas and setting them aside, and seeking the true understanding of God. 

That's part of the reason that God has helped us preserve some of the records left behind by people like Moses who gained a fairly clear understanding in the past.

Why do I say that we were there?

In the latter verses of this chapter, God is creating man, male and female, and telling them -- us -- that we are to assume responsibility for the earth and the plants and animals on it. (The creation of Adam and Eve, the individuals, is described in chapter 2.)

(And there are verses in the Book of Mormon, the Pearl of Great Price, and the Doctrine and Covenants that seem to be best interpreted as that we were there, also.)

We have changed the meaning of dominion to believe that dominion can be arbitrary. But dominion, in the sense that God gave us dominion, comes with the responsibility to take care of things, and the requirement that we will report to God on our efforts at the end of our assignments in mortality, and accept His judgement of what we did with what were were given. (This is also made clear elsewhere.)

Creating us, but, again, there are verses in chapter 2 that indicate that this was some kind of preparatory creation -- planning, maybe, maybe giving us our assignments. We still did not have physical bodies with which we could physically till the ground.

Before I forget, I should point out that these are my interpretations. They are not binding on anyone besides me, and I reserve the right to re-think things next time. These interpretations should be considered to be personal opinions and not considered doctrinal.

Does God Exist? Defining God.

As with everything I write, I do not intend this to be accepted as authoritative, only as a (hopefully) reasoned opinion.

Ground work first:

Doctrine & Covenants 93: 10 God was in the beginning, all things were made by God.

 -- vs. 23, 24 We were also in the beginning, our spirits, the core of truth that is the individual.

 -- v. 26 The Spirit of Truth is the Spirit of God

 -- v. 29 Man was also in the beginning with God. Intelligence, or the light of truth, was not created or made, neither indeed can be.

 -- v. 30 All truth is independent in that sphere in which God has placed it, to act for itself, as all intelligence also; otherwise there is no existence.

If I understand this correctly, we are of the same stuff as God. But so are the animals, plants, and rocks, and so are the atoms and subatomic particles.

In fact, so are our engineering constructs, scientific theories, and mathematical automata, to the extent they are functional. So are our thoughts and ideas themselves, to the extent they are true.

Borrowing, for a moment, from computer science theory, I will use automata as the basis of a model of complexity. (Bear with me, there is reason to this.) Thus:

• Simple levers are an example of your simplest, context-free class of automata. A given input always results in a given output.
  
  Machines that implement such automata are usually fairly easy to design and test, although, if they contain enough levers (or the electronic equivalent, transistors), a thorough brute-force test might require a really long time.
  
  
• Push-on, push-off switches kind of sit at the boundary of the simplest class and the next class. Also, those one-button controls which, by pressing the same button, sequence through a series of selections (for example, bright/dim/night-light/off) are at this boundary.
  
  These can be harder to design and test. A current 64-bit CPU register, for example, cannot be sequenced through every possible combination before we expect our sun to shift out of the main phase. Perhaps I don't need to point this out, but the register itself will fail first.
  
  We generally use some testing strategy other than brute-force in such cases.
  
  
• The next level of complexity is where one or more inputs interact with the current state and the previous state to produce the new state. A laundromat washer controller which allows selection based on the number and kinds of coins and bills inserted to present a set of allowed selections would be an example.
  
  Again, the difficulty of design and testing increases. Even though some of the simpler examples, like the washing machine, can be fairly straightforward, it can be easy to discover failure modes in such machines that prevent further operation and even prevent further testing -- or even cause the machine to self-destruct.
  
  
• The third level of complexity is where you have an ordered memory (memory stack) that allows a machine to try to determine the correct response state by recording input, trying candidate states in some order, comparing them to the input up to a certain point, and backing up to try another if the current candidate state fails. Recursive descent parsers such as those used by computer languages are arch-typical of this class of automaton, although they usually cross over into the next class of complexity because of the complexity of language itself.
  
  For what it's worth, this is the class of automata where testing begins to be really difficult. Thorough testing of these automata generally requires more time than we have -- more than we have time-to-market, longer than we can expect the machine to remain functional, longer than known life of the universe.
  
  So we use test strategies in our designs, and we expect to find failure modes during operation.
  
  
• The fourth level requires multiple ordered memories and other features that can easily become impossible to design correctly, much less test well.
  
  All natural human language is in this class.
  
  If we analyze animals from the point of view of automata, animals are at this level or beyond.
  
  
• We do not know if there are levels beyond the fourth level.
  
  Our mathematicians seem to have proven that two memory stacks should be sufficient for anything we can describe beyond the third level, and we are confident of the math in the proof, but we are not fully confident in the assumptions.
  
  Anyway, we know that we, ourselves, are at the fourth level or beyond.
  
  The solar system, if analyzed from this point of view, is also at the fourth level or beyond. If it's meaningful to analyze the universe as an automaton, for us inside the universe, it is definitely at the fourth level or beyond. I'm leaving out even the high-level description of why we can think this is so, but I am confident of it.
  
  Any God that could exist and be really God must also be capable of behavior beyond our level of complexity, thus at or above the fourth level. Some mathematicians assert, probably in jest, that God must be at a fifth level.
   
• And (drum-roll): laws. The laws which we make to run our society, and the rules we make to live by, tend to start at the lowest level of complexity, and then quickly escalate into the fourth.
  

 

All of that kind of glosses over the differences between ideal automata and real machines, but I think it is enough for the present discussion. 

** Except. I must note here that computers are essentially very large first-level complexity devices into which structures which mimic third- and fourth-level behavior -- within certain limits -- have been constructed. Specifically, they contain memory which can be accessed in an orderly way, allowing stacks and other lists to be constructed. 

They have limits on the sizes of those stacks and lists, but as long as those limits are not exceeded, they can behave at the higher levels.

** Well, I should also note here, that our behavior, human behavior, occurs at all four levels of complexity. What we call deep, multi-dimensional personality is fourth-level complexity.

Put another way, fourth-level complexity tends to express itself as personality. There is a sort-of-equivalence, which I will offer but not prove here -- too much philosophy in one sitting.

** And one more point: Computer languages tend to cross over into fourth-level complexity for a very good reason. Mathematically speaking, there is nothing within the third level of complexity to assign meaning (semantics) to either symbols or language. This is why we can define, if we so choose, a constant called BLACK in a computer program which, when passed to a specific function, paints a white dot on a computer screen.

There is some disagreement about how symbols and semantics get attached, even in the fourth level. Or, rather, we can talk about etymologies, traditions, databases and all sorts of mechanical stuff, but we ultimately are not able, within science or mathematics, to explain why and how words communicate meaning.

In our current milieu, for instance, the word "love" is variously given meanings that range from "lust" to "preference" to  "desire" to specific "desire for another person's happiness". What it means in any specific case is pretty much subject to both the intent of the speaker and the intent of the listener.

** And ,now, there is a question I must ask here:

The first two commandments of Mosaic law forbid the making of any god before God. What is that?

I'm going to leave out a lot more philosophical stuff here, but what we hold as our "gods" are the things we set at top priority in our lives -- the concepts, ideals, physical objects, people, etc., that we use to determine the rules which we choose to operate our lives by.

Hold that thought, okay?

The Devil

No one really likes to associate with habitual liars. Sure, they may be interesting for a while, but eventually you get tired of it.

But we need to know there is such a spirit, because not all spiritual influences are beneficial.

There is an influence that tries to convince us that deceiving others for fun and personal gain is a good thing. Talking about the devil too much is not productive, but it is important to note that that influence is real.

Among the common lies that the deceiver tries to get us to believe is that the devil is red of body, has horns and a tail, carries a pitchfork, and has all the fun. 

Now, professional magicians do not all follow the devil, nor do all accountants, lawyers, and burlesque performers. Some apparently do, but not all. Maybe not even most.

In fact, many self-professed devil worshipers only think they are following the devil, while they are, in fact, not. 

How does this happen?

The devil also has a particular habit of claiming that he is God. Then he might claim that God is like himself in some particular way. Then he might say, "But such a being is [fill-in-the-blank-negation]! It's stupid to believe in such a being. God does not exist!" 

Why would he do this? He is a habitual liar. Apparently, he thinks to make some gain by deceiving us.

I bring this up here because many of the traditional descriptions of God are from the deceiver. I see no need to defend those. Nor to worry about them, once we have accepted that they are wrong.

Why does the devil exist?

The devil does play an important role. Without opposite charge poles, electricity does not flow. Without the gravity well, water does not flow down, nor does evaporated water rise. 

Does that mean that we should pity the devil for taking that role and giving us necessary spiritual opposition? Not if it tempts us to follow the spirit of deception, at any rate.

With that background, here is my understanding of the identity of God:

The Progenitor: 

(Traditionally called The Father in English because of limits inherent in the language more than gender or any other reason I know of.)

This is the generative principle, the set of principles by which the natural universe around us operates -- the Grand Unifying Principles which many physicists and other scientists suspect is there, and some seek to discover. 

I don't know if there was a big bang, but, if there was, this set of principles would be the set of principles that formed the initial conditions at the moment of the big bang.

Does this set of principles have personality? Within the first few moments after the big bang, the universe developed enough structure to act as a collection of multi-stack automata, which puts the universe itself immediately right into that fourth level of complexity. 

So, yes, the universe itself must have a personality, of a sort.

Since we can say that the conditions at the time of the big bang are expressed in the current physical structure of the universe, we can suggest that the nature of the universe is an expression of the personality of God.

Our scientists now have evidence to assert that the universe is probably larger than even a very-long-lived human stuck on earth for as long as the earth exists could ever observe the limits of. And, in fact, if said near-immortal continued to live, but were confined to the remnants of our sun in that far future, tens and hundreds of billions of years forward, the speed limit of light prevents such a person from seeing beyond a certain limit.

If that is true, there is no way any human, nor any institution of man's making, will ever be able to fully comprehend the universe.

And, given the tendency we mortals have to die, and the tendencies of our societies to self-destruct, we must always expect our science to reveal things which we hadn't known before.

Therefore, God is far too great for us to comprehend, and, even if we can say that there is a God who exists as a personage, if we claim to own that God, we claim a false God.

This is very important in the argument about whether God exists, so I'll repeat it:

Any God that a particular mortal person or group of mortal people can claim is uniquely theirs alone is by definition false.

God must be far greater than anything we can imagine or even attempt to define, but that does not mean that God does not exist.

Now, if you are bothered that the idea that the great mean God that your preacher taught was breathing hell-fire at you every time you turned around might actually exist, remember, if your preacher claimed some unique ownership to that God, it was false. 

People get excited when they understand something new, and often forget that other things exists. That's part of the process of backing up on the memory stack and starting down another parse path. Preachers are no exception to this tendency, although some do try hard to remember that they are not yet perfect, as long as they are mortal.

We'll be kind to your preacher and assume it was your preacher's misunderstanding.

In mathematics, two functions which parse the same set of symbols and produce the same results can be considered identical within the context of the specified set of symbols. 

It does not follow in some logical causality, but it does help us understand that, if some immortal being were able to fully develop all of the personality and attributes of the Progenitor, that immortal being could stand in for the Progenitor in any interaction, and nothing would change.

That can't happen within a mortal lifetime, but the eternities are more than just a very long time.

Is there a specific Progenitor, with a personality and all? 

I know a couple of things: One, the universe itself has a personality. And, two, my understanding of the scriptures indicates that there is a specific being that fully has all the personality and attributes of the Progenitor, distinct from the pre-mortal Jesus, with oversight responsibilities for the creation of our solar system and life on this earth. Also, I think I have scriptural basis to identify Jehovah of the Old Testament with the pre-mortal Jesus. Thus, this other being would be, relative to our earth, the Father, the Progenitor.

(And I will point out that Greek and other myths seem to contain a perversion of these ideas. The Father and the Son would not fight each other, because they would be entirely unified in purpose. The Father is not the one in opposition to the Son when the Son is pleading for us before the Father.)

 

The Son:

If there is a progenitor, there is a child. Moreover, the child is able to grow to become like the progenitor, and, if the child does succeed in becoming like the progenitor, the child can fully represent the progenitor. 

Jesus asserted that He ascended to the Father after His death and resurrection. I won't get into the details of all of His teachings here, other than that I have scriptural reason to believe He did, and to believe He was therefore qualified and able to stand in for the set of principles by which this universe runs.

I will note this much of what He teaches -- repentance, or changing one's behavior to learn to be more like the Progenitor, falls rather neatly out of the understanding of the third and fourth levels of complexity. Part of the reason we have memory is so that we can back up and try other paths in our lives. Forgetting may be important, but so is remembering.

Oh, and I will refer you to the Beatitudes, Matthew 5, 6, and 7, or 3rd Nephi 11, 12, 13, and 14. These summarize much of His most important teachings, and are enough to give us confidence in the personality of God.

 

The Holy Spirit:

Remember that I mentioned that computer languages tend to cross over from the third level of complexity to the fourth, and that we still have trouble getting meaning into words.

In the Book of Mormon, 2nd Nephi 33: 1, we find this little morsel of wisdom:

... when a man speaketh by the power of the Holy Ghost the power of the Holy Ghost carrieth it unto the hearts of the children of men.

Since we have Ghostbusters and other jests which abuse the word "ghost", I'll use the word "spirit" instead, here.

This third member of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit, is that which is the medium of communication. Without some spiritual influence, it quickly becomes difficult to communicate. If a negative spirit pervades in a conversation, it can be very difficult to communicate anything positive. 

Turning our own heart towards a positive spirit, towards, for example, a desire for the happiness and well-being of the other person, tends to make it much easier to communicate with positive result.

I'm not going to get too mystical here, but this Holy Spirit also functions at the fourth level of complexity or above, and also fully expresses the personality of the Progenitor principles.

This is what I mean by God, or these three are the Godhead that I worship. These define my intended priorities, and, to the extent that I am successful at implementing my intentions, my actual priorities. To the extent that I understand them, they define my behavior.

I do not own them. If I could, they would not be worth my worship. 

I am trying to learn to be like them, but I am fully aware that I will only see, at best, modest, small successes at that in this life. 

I have faith that, if I learn in this life to keep repenting when I find myself not following God, to keep learning more about God through studying the teachings of the Son, listening to the Holy Spirit, and to keep changing my life, behavior, and heart to conform to the attributes of Godliness to the best of my understanding, I will be able to continue in that path and stand with confidence before them after I die, and join in their work in the world to come. 

If I fail to do that, what I will be able to do after I leave this mortal world will be limited.

I should provide scripture references to each point in the above, but my time is limited. More importantly, I don't want people to think I'm any sort of expert in this philosophy. Everyone needs to develop their own understanding of God, or, if they need to, of cosmology and the purpose of the universe and themselves without a God who has personality.